


Forget

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Declarations Of Love, Estrangement, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Injury Recovery, Male-Female Friendship, Psychological Trauma, Separations, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 20:50:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7284274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's been seventy-one days since she told him that she needed time. Seventy-one days of the only silence that matters. Wherever she is, he'll never be any nearer."</p><p>WARNING: This is not finished. It's unlikely (the very next thing to impossible, in fact) that I will ever finish it, which is why I hadn't posted it here at AO3. However, I did promise a couple of readers that I wouldn't remove anything from FF.net that wasn't at least temporarily available here. It's not really a story that I ever intended to have much in the way of closure anyway, but the chapters you'll see don't represent where I thought it should end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set between seasons 3 and 4—really in the middle of "Rise," (4 x 01) I suppose. And AU, I guess? The premise is that Beckett is back in the  
> city for weeks before she returns to the 12th.
> 
> WARNING: This is not finished. It's unlikely (the very next thing to impossible, in fact) that I will ever finish it, which is why I hadn't posted it here at AO3. However, I did promise a couple of readers that I wouldn't remove anything from FF.net that wasn't at least temporarily available here. It's not really a story that I ever intended to have much in the way of closure anyway, but the chapters you'll see don't represent where I thought it should end.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's been seventy-one days since she told him that she needed time. Seventy-one days of the only silence that matters. Wherever she is, he'll never be any nearer."

  
  


* * *

The city is harder than she ever imagined it could be. Some nights she weeps for it. The ache she feels here. Back inside the familiar boundaries. The lines enfolding her life-long home. Everything she's ever loved. Some nights she presses her forehead to the living room glass and sobs.

Because everything hurts. The sounds and smells and the crush of bodies on the streets. How fast everything moves. How fast life goes by. It all rips through her. She's trapped in the howling mess of her own mind. The howling mess of a broken body that hurts every second. She's nothing but ragged edges that bleed and bleed and never meet. Being back is harder than she ever imagined.

She thought it would be better. To be home. A different kind of silence than her dad's cabin. Silence she knows. Silence she's carved out for herself over the years. Built up from nothing to fill her own space. Her own things. She thought it would be better, but that's hard, too. It's all so _hard._

Clothes that her scars won't let her wear, one way or another. Favorite things taken from her. Unforgiving necklines. Fasteners she can't face with stiff arms. Stiff everything and shaking fingers. The unkind drape of fabric over too-sharp angles. A body she no longer recognizes.

More than that taken from her. Some days it's as if there's nothing here she can have. Hers and not hers. Mugs and linens set too high up by some smug version of herself. Some immortal. Someone invulnerable laying things out just so to hurt her. To hurt the broken future self she is now. Pots and her favorite skillet. Everything too heavy for her to manage. Everything too painful.

She hardly eats. She hardly sleeps. She keeps the city through the window, mostly. Glass between her and life, such as it is.

It's not better here. It's not better to be back. It's a different kind of worse and she weeps for that, too.

She weeps for him. She won't let herself say it. Not even to the window. Not to the ceiling or the walls or the frayed sleeves of the only sweater that seems warm enough in the middle of the night. When she sits stiffly in the living room chair and stares out the glass, her spine listing to one side. The only position her broken body will allow her by night. She won't even let herself think it, but she weeps for him, too.

Because he's nearer. Because he's not.

It's been seventy-one days since she told him that she needed time. Seventy-one days of the only silence that matters.

Wherever she is, he'll never be any nearer.

It's harder than she ever imagined.

* * *

He thought he knew what it was to hurt. He thought he'd learned long before her. Packed away the parts of himself that remembered how to feel that deeply. He thought he knew.

Maybe he had. Once upon a time. Kyra leaving. Meredith and years of a lonely life crowded with people. Everyone clapping him on the back and telling him he was a lucky man. That he must be happy. Telling himself he was. As happy as it was in him to be since he'd learned how to hurt.

Maybe he had. Maybe he knew all that time. Maybe he forgot.

But this has felt like learning. The last three years. Learning all over again to hurt or knowing how—really how—for the first time. Why does it matter which it is? He asks himself that, again and again.

It's just that he thought he knew. He worries at it. Twists and prods the academic point about when it started. He has the time. He has nothing but time when the dead of night stretches on like it does now. He counts back.

He thought he knew when her hand dropped away from his face. When he chattered her name out, even as his blood slowed to a thick crawl. The last thing alive in him a cry for her. A howl. Lunatic grief like he'd never imagined. Conviction that she was dying in his arms.

He thought he knew watching from afar. Waking with her name dragging at his tongue. Asking.

_Beckett. Where is she?_

Needing to know before anything else—before he was sure that was breath going in and out and blood moving again in his own veins—that she was still in the world. _Beckett._ Watching her step into another man's arms. Knowing and not knowing that she didn't love him. Knowing and not knowing.

He thought he knew with the sun beating down on him. Suffocating in black. Annoyed by the heat in the thick of everything. Rank sweat blinding him and life pouring out of her. Dying in his arms again. In broad daylight this time. Standing with her and watching her fall. Helpless. Fighting his way into the ambulance. The piercing wail of the monitor and the words. _We lost her._ The whir and sizzle and brutal thud of the defibrillator.

Josh coming for him and anguish welling up. The words fracturing everything else. Blazing.

_You did this. She was shot because of you._

He thought that was pain. It was. All of it. Any of it. Each moment discrete. Shelved in glass and breaking open in his head. There again when he's done feeling it. Filled to paper-thin walls and waiting for next time. Each discrete moment. Pain or an incredible facsimile.

He practically has to schedule his nightmares about all the ways he's almost lost her. All the things that have come so close to taking her from him.

But none of them count. He's been fooling himself all along.

He knows pain now. She left. Took herself from him. It's not freezing to death or Josh or the world ending. She left, and it's nothing he can fight.

_I'll call you,_ ok _?_

She sent him away.

It's been seventy-four days. He knows now.

* * *

She walks at night. She's supposed to walk. The physical therapist nags and nags. She doesn't care about that. She barely bothers to meet his eyes, and he has no patience for her. For the sullen, to-the-letter approach that's all she has. Nagging wouldn't make a bit of difference, but she hurts if she goes too long without it. Her spine twists, and her ribs crack in place. Her hips ache. Toes and kneecaps. Prominences and hollows she never knew she had. She goes brittle from head to toe. She hurts more.

But daytime is still too much. Bright light on glass and shoulders brushing hers. Unexpected elbows and sound. Strangers' voices in her ear. Heat and all that life moving so fast. It's still too much. Far more than battered mind and broken body will allow her, so she walks at night.

It's bad enough. She's afraid every second. She hates herself for it. She hates the city and the hole running through the middle of her. She hates that the only thing to fill it is fear, but that's the reality. That's her life now.

She's afraid. Familiar streets that are too empty. Sidewalks that aren't empty enough, even at night. She's afraid of breaking. Pushing herself too far. Faster than the fragile pieces of her body can go.

She's afraid of herself. Of her mind stranding her. Leaving her to shake on a park bench when she can't go a step further, too weak even to flag down a cab for a long, long while. Too overwhelmed and jagged inside to choke out her address.

She walks slowly. Hugs the wall and scans ahead for doorways. For hollows in the brickwork and escape routes between newspaper boxes. For the way home. The quickest. The easiest. The way back to all the things she can't have.

She walks with her head down. With hands stuffed deep into the pockets of a jacket that's far too warm for the downhill slide of summer. For heat that rises up from the pavement well into the night A jacket she tries to leave behind every time, but she can't. She _can't_.

She walks nowhere. Tight laps around her building at first. Spelling out the letters of her street. A chant to occupy tongue and mind and fingers. To take her there and back again. But she pushes herself as the days add up and the nights grow longer. She tries. A half block here. An alley one night, but it's a mistake. She stumbles home, teeth chattering in the heat, a long time later. A long time, the clock insists, and she doesn't remember.

Still, she pushes herself. It's eighty-seven now. Eighty-seven days, and she adds a little every night. She sets out earlier. Goes farther. Makes herself walk nowhere and back.

It's been eighty-seven days when she sees him. A block away, but she knows the lines of his shoulders. The way his chin tips to the side, because he's talking to himself. Not to himself. To someone in his head. Nikki or some reporter. Esposito, because the perfect comeback always hits him later.

_Her._

He talks to her in his head a lot. She can't count the times she's been on the receiving end of a wink and a knowing look. An inside joke she's never heard, but he thinks she has. He's sure she has, because he talks to her in his head. He used to. It's been eighty-seven days now, and who knows? Who knows.

She sees him and thinks nothing of it. Why should she? She sees him everywhere. Pouring coffee at her kitchen counter. Lingering shyly on her doorstep with flowers. Standing by her side with the shutters flung wide.

_Sometimes I forget you live with this everyday._

She sees him and stops. Not hiding. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk on the far side of the street and watches. Something like pleasure rippling through her. Something like peace, though it takes a while to recognize. It's been eighty-seven days.

She sees him and starts again. Her body comes alive. Pain, but joy, too. Lightness and frustration. Longing and . . . _rightness._ Completion and the corners of her life snapping into place. Home at last. The right silence inside and out.

She sees him and her mouth opens. Her hand raises. She steps toward the curb. A cab streaks by, horn blaring, and she falls. She drops to her knees. Forehead to the pavement, she cowers in the shadow of a lampost.

He turns briefly toward the commotion. He looks, then looks away. His face catches the light. Just an instant but she _sees_ him.

He's broken. Utterly. No ease in the lines of his mouth. Shadows and tight unhappiness around his eyes. Defeat in the slow, dull swing of his head. Toward her—toward the sound—and back again, eyes on the ground as he goes nowhere.

It's just an instant, but she knows him in the space of it. An expanse of time too brief to count, but she knows everything. The weight of eighty-seven days. The burden of silence. She knows that he does this every night. He walks alone. That he has for a long, long while.

A long while, but not all of it. Not eighty-seven days. He would have hoped at first. Believed in her like he always has. But these are his nights now. She knows that.

She knows he's broken. That he's going nowhere.

She follows.


	2. Chapter 2

 

He knows she's there.

It's not that he sees her. He just  _knows._

He's curious about it. In a far-off kind of way, with his feet moving beneath him. With storefronts disappearing out of the corner of his eye and the scenery changing as it does—as it has all these nights—he wonders  _how_  he knows.

His mind is ruthless about it. His broken heart. Whichever or both. They're in agreement for once. There's never a moment when it feels like a wish or a sign or things coming right. There's not a single second when he thinks it means something.

She's just there. But he does wonder how he knows.

He wonders if it might be a glimpse, really. If it might be as mundane as that. Light reaching cells, like every image the eye takes in. He read somewhere that he sees more than he sees. That everyone alive moves through the world learning how  _not_  to see. How to filter the constant barrage of image. The mind like a shutter, managing. Exlcuding. A frantic flicker of noticing and not noticing.

The writer in him hates the very thought. That every blink could be a crisis. An unseen fork in the road. A decision of some kind that can't be unmade with every foot falling unnoticed on to one path, not the other. Choice snatched away and everything in life left to chaos. The glint of sunlight on a glass scope, once, twice, three times. Unseen 'till the last. His life. Hers. Droplets running one way, not the other, down the back of a dying hand.

The writer in him protests. What little there is left protests, but it could be that simple. It could be how he knows she's there now. In  _this_ moment. When he's seen her a hundred times before. In a hundred hundred moments he's seen her and known every one for a fantasy. A dream.

It's probably as simple as seeing, but he wonders about it. The bigger picture and everything he hasn't seen along the way. How many times he's been the fool who just  _won't_ see.

As for her, she's just there. He knows.

He wonders  _why now?_  Another practical matter to busy his mind. Eighty-seven days and  _why now?_  But that leaves him soon enough. He doesn't wonder long. Chancewithout meaning. Heart and mind in agreement again. She hasn't come for him. The final act unfolded months ago. Eighty-seven days ago.

Why now? It's just the unkindness of entropy, as uncaring as anything else. In a city of eight million people, it was bound to happen sometime. It shouldn't surprise him. It doesn't, really.

Why  _shouldn't_  it happen today? Chance doesn't mark time the way he does. It doesn't care how long it's been since he ran out of fingers and toes and hope. Physics doesn't know if it's been eighty-seven days or a thousand. If it's tomorrow or the day he dies.

_Eighty-seven days._

He's out of questions then.  _How? Why now?_  Asked and answered and there's only one thing left in it. It's not even a question. His mind won't frame it and his heart is done with all that. It's done with  _why?_  and what things mean. What anything means.

She's there. He knows. It doesn't make a difference. That's the whole truth of it.

It's nothing more than the blare of a cab horn that really draws his eye to the far side of the street. He sees her then, he supposes. Light reaching cells and nothing more, then. Image, afterimage, and the strangeness of it all. The crown of her head. Fingers knotted behind, sheltering.

He sees her then, but he already knew. It's all the same, before and after. Seeing her— _knowing_ —doesn't slow his steps or change his trajectory. He moves on as before. As he has, from breath to breath, since he gave up. He stays the course. A straight line going nowhere. Burning seconds and minutes and hours and days.

She's there, he knows, and this is the rest of his life.

It doesn't matter where she is. Her position in time and space have nothing to do with him anymore.

It hurts worse than anything, and this is the rest of his life.

* * *

He sets a brutal pace.

It  _feels_  brutal, but the scenery says different. She counts the seconds between streetlights. His heavy, deliberate steps from doorway to doorway. She anchors her mind with the exercise. Seconds and footfalls and street numbers. They add up.

He's moving slowly. He's moving with care, like he expects the world to rise up and hurt him. Like he's guarding against it. He's broken, too, and the days weigh on him. He has nowhere in mind and no time he needs to be there. But, to her, the pace feels brutal in more ways than one.

It's faster than she can go. Her breath comes hard before the first streetcorner. A stoplight, but no respite. No moment to pull air into her lungs. He swings his head from side to side, not really seeing, and crosses against it.

She can't follow. The traffic is far off yet but coming steadily. Headlights and glinting chrome grills like angry faces. Menacing and coming steadily on. Her ribs catch hooks of pain and she's light headed. It's faster than she can go. She needs to follow. She knows she won't make it. She leans against a newspaper box. Waits as he recedes and the fear makes itself known.

She can't do it. She can't go after him.

She can't  _not._ Pain and airlessness and fear give way to something else. A tiny corner of silence inside her. The rightness in the moment she first saw him. Solidity. Realness and potential she refuses to let go. She can't  _not_ go after him.

But the fear drags at her feet. It slows her. Makes her hug the wall and it whispers. That it's farther than she can go at stretch. That she's all her fingers and all her toes and then some away from home and there's no shelter here. Nowhere to press shoulderblades to solid brick and hands to thighs and she  _can't._ She can't do this.

A car rolls by, dark windows rattling with cranked up bass. A shriek goes up from a shoving group of teenagers. Her heart pounds. She breaks for shadow. Scrabbles for something solid and knuckles meet sharp corners. Blood comes. It wells up in raw places and her scars burn.

All of her burns. She's a riot of flames, inside and out. Pain. Exhaustion. Fear. Her mind is a black tangle of fear and he's small, smaller, smallest in the distance.

She's not beside him. That's the worst of all. The most brutal. She's hobbling and out of step and she should  _be_ there. Her feet should strike the pavement in rhythm with his. Side by side. Together at every turn, not each of them alone.

But they are alone. He is and she is and this is her doing.

She falls still. Stops in the middle of the sidewalk, far from shelter, and strains up on her toes to look. To see for as many moments as she can. She strains up, and It hurts. It  _hurts_.

He moves alone toward the vanishing point. Any second he'll disappear and the last breath in her rises up. A cry waiting.

He stops then. At the last possible moment, he stops. His hands find his pockets and his shoulders hunch in a gesture so familiar she can taste it. So familiar that she almost spends the last breath in her crying out.

He turns. It's not even an instant, but he turns. She sees him in profile. Brow, nose, chin like he's beside her. Like things are as they should be.

But they're not. It's a glance over his shoulder. Not even an instant and he's gone.

_He knows._

It dawns on her as he winks out of sight. Certainty of it taking his place in the world like conservation of mass. She sees her life before this moment and after. No uncertainty on either side of it.

He knows she's there.

He's known for a hundred doorways and so many seconds that she lost count. And he didn't miss a single step. Never slowed or faltered. He's known all along, and it's nothing to him that she's there. Nothing.

It almost takes her to her knees all over again.

Almost.

 


	3. Forget, Ch. 3

He winds up in a bar. An oasis, sudden, dreadful, and necessary when he can't go a step further. When it hits him.

He looked back. It's almost enough to make him laugh. If he remembered how, he might actually laugh.

Looking back. It's not quite the oldest sin, but the next thing to it.

She followed. For a while she did. He knew. It was more acceptance than realization in the moment. Looking back with no doubt at all what he'd see, even if heart and mind and whatever else is left of him are curiously silent on how he _could_ have known. How he could have been so certain that she had followed. How he could have known when she stopped. Which moment was his exact last chance to see.

It was. He did.

He saw her, still and alien in the streetlight. Smaller somehow. Bowed and stooped and diminished even though she was up on her toes. Even though her chin was high, and all of her craned forward. Toward him. Looking and looking as hard as she could. Shaking with effort and searching the distance for him. For him.

She followed. She stopped following. He looked back. He took the absolute last chance to see, and he has only himself to blame for the fresh blood now. For every wound ripped open and raw.

Those are the facts. He won't wonder why. He plants himself on a stool. He sets palms and elbows on the scarred surface of the bar and he absolutely will not wonder why about any of it.

The bartender wordlessly slides him a menu. _Barmaid._ He takes in the cracked leather covering the stool, its sharp edges digging in even through his jeans. The half-dead neon signs and the short list of drinks. Beer and a few kinds of whiskey.

He decides she's a barmaid, as if that matters. It's some echo of a habit. Something that feels ancient now. Something from back when he used to notice things. When he used to gather details to himself. Sweep them on to the page and coax them apart to use later. Back when he made things.

He orders . . . something. His tongue is awkward and the words are rough. He wonders suddenly how long it's been since he's spoken aloud. How many days.

_Eighty-seven._

It's the only number he knows. The only one that means anything to him, but it's absurd. He clears his throat. He tries to meet the woman's eyes. To answer the follow-up questions he doesn't understand. He tries to remember how this goes. Human contact.

But she edges away from him. The barmaid. She turns her back to him entirely, and she's longer about pouring the drink than she needs to be. He thinks so, anyway. He doesn't remember how any of this goes.

He looks around. The bar is neither crowded nor empty. It's late. He knows that much, but he can't tell how unusual it is that someone might wander in at this hour. That _he_ might wander in. He doesn't know what day it is for the rest of the world or if he's giving off a not-from-around-here vibe.

He thanks the woman as she slides the glass toward him from minimum safe distance. He tries to smile, but she only relents so far as a coaster. He sips at the liquor, thick and cheap and oily, but good enough to hurt a different way.

He focuses on it. The burning inside his nose. The unkind slide over his tongue and down his throat. He imagines the course it follows. Down and down, burning all the way to fill the hollow inside him. One kind of hollow.

He doesn't think about her. The way it took the little left in her to strain up on her toes and look. Why she followed. Why she stopped. Why she's gone and not gone. He doesn't think about it.

He raises and lowers the glass. Flicks his wrist and another appears. A gentler meeting of glass and wood this time. A cocktail napkin and a word or two. The barmaid must feel sorry for him.

He raises and lowers the glass and suddenly she's there. His back is to the street. To the door, the window, and the whole world outside this place. But he knows she's there. Just outside. Brick and glass and eighty-seven days standing between them. A hole in her chest, a hollow in his.

She's there.

* * *

She's moving before she realizes it. She remembers her heels dropping back to the pavement. The shockwave through shin and thigh and all of her. Pain dragging fingers along behind it. Always pain.

But movement. That's a surprise. Something in progress when she lands back in her body. The how and why of pulling herself up and _moving._ Of how far she's come from the moment he turned away—that's a surprise. A mystery.

She's careful. Pushes herself as fast as she can go, but no harder than that. She wonders about it. The way she suddenly knows her body. She knows its limits, but its possibilities, too. It hurts—of course it hurts—but there's an edge to it now. A point of focus that sorts it all into the proper parts. All the different kinds of pain and what she can do with them.

Her body hurts. Muscles and joints protest. Skin stretches and there's the twist of searing pain that runs through her scars. It lights up like the bones of the city from high above. A history of all that's happened. The jolt of scar tissue, wire, and cartilage around her heart, cracked open and closed up again as if that's how it works. As if it's that simple.

But it is. Right now it's as simple as rest at a stoplight. Breath as deep as she can pull it in to herself to slow her heart and still those dragging fingers for this moment and the one after that and the one after that if she's gotten it wrong this stretch. If she hasn't picked out the cry that matters from the endless roar her body sends up. If she's gone too far or pushed too hard.

Right now it's as simple as following. Listening to her body and the city and the way she knows him. Never questioning whether he might have turned here or crossed this street. If he'd have doubled back.

If he might have tried to lose her.

She pulls up short at that. She stops and her whole body screams. Wrenching, blinding pain as everything twists with the sudden cessation of motion. Every cell screams, and her head snaps right and left. Her heart pounds and she's desperate for cover. For silence and home and all the things her body won't let her have, but at least she knows. She _knows_ what it's like to live there. Dwell. Exist. _Whatever_.

She's turning now. A circle in place and a clumsy tug back in the direction she came. Late night people scatter around her. They fan out wide and come back together with sidelong glances and fast-moving feet. Eager to get past the kind of trouble she is know. To get clear of this strange, broken thing cluttering up the sidewalk.

She wants to go. Not home, but somewhere. Away. She wants not to be this anymore. This thing to be sidestepped. Avoided. Lost.

But she turns again. The decision happens somewhere else. Wherever this came from in the first place. The mystery of movement. A complete, stubborn revolution. She gathers herself in and she moves on. She follows. Again, she follows.

She traces his path unerringly. Every step she's sure he would have taken, and that's a mystery, too. How she knows and where the will comes from, just like that. Eighty-seven days and a glimpse and she's following. She's following.

Her steps slow. She drags to a stop. Gradual this time and she hurts in different places. Different ways.

She turns to face a dingy building. Brick that's seen better days and cloudy windows. She can barely make out anything through the smear and blur of neon. But there he is. Inside where she can't go.

Her feet fail. Her body stops and the will that's brought her this far vanishes. She _can't_.

She's steps from the door. A square of sidewalk, two panes of glass and the length of the bar between them. All that and eighty-seven days, and she wants more than anything to close the distance.

She doesn't know why. What she'd say. What she could possibly say.

But there's nothing. _Nothing._ She knows that.

_I miss you. It hurts. I remember._

She doesn't know what she'll say, but she wants a chance to say it.

She wants a chance, and she's come this far. But he's inside.

She can't.

* * *

He says something. Does something. After a while. An eternity between the moment he knows she's there and the moment he rushes back into the world. The moment it all drags him back, kicking and screaming into the rest of his life.

Whatever it is, whatever he does and whatever it sounds like, it's enough to alarm the barmaid.

" _Hey._ " She strides toward him. Her shoulders are stiff. She holds out a rag like she's going to shoo him away.

He looks up and it must be bad. The look on his face. Everything about him. It must be bad, because she stops. She swallows a sigh. Impatience that she drew the short straw tonight. That she has him to deal with. Whoever he is. _Whoever._

"Is there . . .?"

He starts, but she cuts him off. Quick and sharp enough that he wonders what it is he's done. How long it's been and what he might have done in the mean time to deserve it.

"I think you're finished."

He follows her gesture to his own hand. It looks like his, anyway, wrapped around an empty glass he vaguely remembers. His second. Third? He's lost again. Disoriented and unsure why he stopped here. Why he looked back. Why he keeps showing up to every single day just to hurt like this.

"Another way," he says. He blinks up at the barmaid. "Is there another way?" He knows he's not making sense, but he can't remember how any of this goes. "Out." That seems right. _Out._ It's what he wants right now. He turns on the stool. The neon hurts his eyes. He turns the other way and peers hopefully into the darkness. "Is there a back way?"

The barmaid softens. Not softens, exactly. Unbends a fraction. She's amused. Perplexed, but it must be funny to her. A little bit, anyway. It must look like he's running the way a hundred men have run before. It must be taking the shape of something she understands.

"Stock room." She sets her rag down and tugs at the strings on the apron.

His mouth opens and shuts. He can't make sense of the words. The jerk of her head toward the comparative kindness of the dark back end of the bar is a mystery.

She rolls her eyes. Calls something over her shoulder to a burly guy who takes up her station behind the bar.

"Stock room," she says again. "There's a door to the alley out back. I'm due for a smoke anyway."

He pushes up from the stool. He follows, then turns back. He digs out his wallet. Empties the bills on to the bar and follows.

She's gone already by the time he follows. He stands under the bare bulb of the stock room and twists in place. It's cramped and dusty and dim and he doesn't see a door. He doesn't see much, but a curl of cigarette smoke tugs him in the right direction.

He makes his way through the door. The barmaid leans against the filthy wall ten steps down. He opens his mouth to thank her, but the words are gone again. He nods. She waves him off. Stares up into the narrow gap between buildings and huffs out a ribbon of smoke.

He turns. He makes his way up the alley, away from her. He sees the city ahead. Hears it. Loud and angry and alive. It hits him, low and sudden. He draws in a sharp breath.

He turns back to the barmaid. Holds up a hand, but she's glaring at him anyway. She's throwing down her cigarette and stubbing it out. Folding her arms and glaring.

"I . . . one thing." He doesn't know what he's doing, but the words come anyway, loud enough to carry to her and it all feels so strange. He wonders again how long it's been since he spoke to anyone at all. "I'm going, but . . . will you do one thing for me?"

She goes on glaring a minute. She makes him wait. "Is it a good idea?"

He shakes his head. His eyes drop to the ground.

"No." It's not and he was going. He _was_ , but he looks up at her and asks. "Will you do it anyway?"

* * *

She's rigid on the bus stop bench. The metal is hard and cool beneath her palms. The curve of it is agony against her back. All up and down her spine and clutching around at her ribs.

But she doesn't know how to leave. Whatever will brought her this far is gone. It's long since burned up, and she's stranded.

He's inside. She can't. She doesn't know how to leave.

"Hey."

The voice comes from behind her. She ignores it. She's gotten good at that, however long she's been here. It's victory of a kind. That she stopped shaking at some point and she's an expert now at keeping still. Keeping her eyes on the dirty elastic of her slip-on shoes as the words come at her.

But this one comes again. This voice sounds out again. Closer this time, and she tries to twist around. Away. She tries to move as her heart slams up and hits the roof of her mouth, but it's been too long. She's stone and the pain is too much. Panic can't move her now. Fear can't. She's stone.

The words come to her, though. They come again, moving in front of her now. Feet and legs. Skinny jeans and an annoyed looking woman holding out a paper cup. Something crushed on the bottom with flimsy wings pulling away. One of those handles that never works.

"This is for you." She thrusts the cup forward. "Just coffee. No booze out the door."

Kate stares. She watches the steam twist over the rim. She's still. Stranded.

The woman takes pity on her.

"It's from him," she says more gently. "Your friend."

Kate's mouth opens and closes. A shuddering breath makes its way out. It's almost a laugh. Something somewhere inside her meant it to be. She shakes her head. Half an inch in each direction and it hurts. Of course it hurts.

"He's not my friend." The words open her eyes wide. They startle her.

The woman snorts. She looks away and back down again. Back down at Kate.

"Didn't think so."

  



	4. Forget, Ch. 4

He wakes to the passage of time. His eyes open and close, and the world comes back to him in frames flickering by. Dark and dark and dark, then light moving. Climbing the wall and sweeping over the floor. Washing over his body and back out again to wherever it is light goes.

He slept. Long and hard and dreamless while the world turned. He _slept_.

The fact presses him down into the mattress. It pushes at the edges of his mind as he takes inventory. Shoes on his feet and the sharp indentation of his belt buckle twisting into the curve of his hip. The duvet smooth and undisturbed on either side of him. One fist flung overhead the other a tight press against the center of his body.

He slept.

He rolls to his side and tries to swing his feet to the floor. Gives up immediately with a grunt that's too loud. Too loud in silence heavy with time. Days and weeks he's lived with the stale weight of it. Solitude at first. Isolation now, though the word doesn't come easily. Nothing comes easily.

It hurts. Everything. That shouldn't be new. It shouldn't feel sudden, but it does.

His _body_ hurts, and that's something he hasn't lived with in a while. Eighty-eight days, he guesses. Dark and light again and this makes eighty-nine since a bullet ripped through her and took the world to pieces. Took him to pieces. Body and mind and heart, severed and bleeding. Separate all this time.

Even from the first, when he was pushing through. Working. Waiting and looking up at every footfall. Eager hands fumbling at the phone every time, but separate even then. Even before giving up, he's lived apart. Divided and in pieces all this time, and he's forgotten so much.

Now, though, he's all sharp pain and deep, throbbing aches. His stomach twists and burns. He registers hunger. A headache that stomps its way down his spine. His skin feels wrong. Sagging and dull and pins and needles. Like he's dried out. Like he's been sobbing in his sleep.

He hurts. It's new, and for a brief moment he doesn't remember. He can't think what's changed. He just wants to push it all away. This strange body that seems to be his and all the new pain that comes with it.

He doesn't _want_ to remember. Panic rises like sun on the water, swift and blazing and unkind. Burning him. He scrapes himself off the bed. Lurches and stumbles from light to gloom to light again. The sun is up, but the shades are shut tight. The blinds.

His steps are loud and swallowed up at the same time. His shoulder catches the edge of a bookcase and the sharp corner of something drags at his knee. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Not a curse or a howl or a groan.

Everything hurts.

He remembers, then. His body and the world and one piercing point of contact. That's all it takes, and now he's cracked open. Gaping wide, and every part of him needs something. Water. Light. Warmth. Movement. Sound. Food. Touch.

Her.

 _Kate_.

He _needs,_ but the world is empty. A paper cup and a bus stop bench can't change that.

For him, it's empty.

* * *

It's a strange centerpiece. The tiny cup with its creased, listing wings. The sweater with a chain of brown-stained starbursts climbing one sleeve. The heap of it where they both fell. Where she cast it all from her as she stuttered through the door last night, weeping. _Weeping._

It sits untouched now, a neglected shrine. Or maybe it's her. A pilgrim expelled. Turned away for sins too many to count. Too terrible to say out loud.

Whichever way it cuts, she can't bear to be near it. Too much wells up in her. It presses hard, cruel fingers into her scars. It hammers at her insides. She can't be near, so she gives it wide berth. Walks one foot in front of the other in a long, sweeping arc. She keeps it to her left out of the corner of her eye.

She'd like to be near it, though. She wants that badly. She remembers that moment of joy on the street. The first moment she saw him and the way things came right. She remembers it like sun breaking through angry winter skies. Like green forcing up through ice and snow and rocky earth.

She remembers and she wants to be near. Contact. A small, crumpled something linking him to her, even if he never laid hands on it. She'd like to hold it and be content. Warmth against her palms and scent rising up. Taste on her tongue and feeling running through her. The particular heat that comes from this and only this. Something dear that became their ritual along the way.

She'd like that. She would have liked it, she thinks, though it's taken her too long to come to that. Like most things, it's taken her too long. And here she is, folded in a shadowed corner with her back against the wall. On the outskirts of another thing she can't have. Another thing not for the likes of her and the broken mess she is.

But she'd like to have it to do over again. She'd go after him this tim, even though the woman said he was long gone. That he'd slipped away down the alley with a stubborn nothing after asking the strange favor. Even so, she wishes she'd done it differently. That she'd tried. Tried more. Tried harder to be less broken than this.

She wishes she'd turned inward and let herself listen. To him and the city. The pieces of herself coming together again, something finally coming right as she followed. Pain, still. Terrible pain, but knowable with her finger hooked through handle of the cup, a firm hold on the creased, listing wings and a careful sheltering palm firm at the rim to hold back the tide as she moved.

She wishes she'd found him. Stared down an alley or across some street and called out to him. She wishes she'd walked right up to him and let the words come.

_Thank you. I miss you. I remember._

She wishes.

But she didn't. She hadn't, and this is how she's left. Shivering, because it's the only sweater warm enough in the middle of the night. Lonely and far away from a tiny paper cup. Weeping for the things she didn't do. Weeping for him, because it hurts. It _hurts_ and there's no point any more in not thinking it. In not saying it to the walls and the windows and the frayed sleeves she can't be near.

She didn't and this is what she's left with . A little more of the world she can't walk in.

* * *

Dark comes again, like always.

Hours tick by as he opens and closes things. Cabinets and doors and unexamined places inside. The sun crosses the sky and sinks again as he moves through the loft—home, he keeps reminding himself of that—and finds everything empty. Boxes tipped on their sides, far back on the cabinet shelves. Mouldering things in the blinding light of the refrigerator.

He gulps water from his hands. Sits down hard when the cold hits the pit of his stomach and tries to climb up again. He shakes with pain. Too many different kinds to inventory and there's nothing for it as the hours tick by. Not quiet or stillness. Not moving. Climbing stairs and dragging his fingers along the wall as he goes. Not forcing words over his tongue for practice. Not the fistful of expired aspirin he finds in a cast off travel kit of his mother's.

There's nothing for it, 'till dark comes and calls for him.

The city. He wants to be out. He's desperate for air, suddenly, and the stairs feel endless. He pushes out the side door of the building, desperate for twilight and full places. He hurts. He keeps on hurting, but it's less out here. The pain leaves him in steady waves. He's bottomless with it, but at least in the dark it goes.

He thinks practical thoughts. They're sudden. A surprise. They feel like someone else's, and he's not fooling himself. Not really, and not for long, but he comes back to them anyway. He drags his mind back to things he can do. Things he ought to do.

He turns his shoulders this way and that as muscle memory takes him through crowds that trudge along and static clots of people. It's early enough for that. Dark, but early enough for people, and this is New York. He thinks about groceries. Food beyond a handful of stale crackers from the very last cabinet. Dish soap and a sliding stack of mail he doesn't remember shoving in a drawer. Scotch on his tongue and empty bottles.

_Emptied._

The word lands hard and unkind. Panic like sun on the water again. He hears his mother's voice, white with anger and the brittle clink of glass. The slosh of liquid and the bitten off consonants of his name.

He moves quickly on. He lets that pain leave him, too. Lets it skim the surface of his memory. It's too much. He needs other things. So much right now. So much.

Food. Clean towels and water scalding his skin. Later. Eventually. There's nothing in the loft. Nothing where it should be and nothing he can use.

He forces his thoughts to center _._ Practical lists of practical things as his feet keep him moving, block after block and corner after corner until he stops short.

His body does, all at once, leaving his mind to catch up as he twists in place, feet fixed on a familiar square of sidewalk. Only just barely familiar and it can't be. It can't.

His head snaps up. His eyes go wide like enough light will tell him something different. That he hasn't wound up here again. The bar to his right and the bench to his left.

He opens his eyes wide and waits for the light to tell him it's not her.

It's not Kate five steps in front of him. Falling.

* * *

The sun goes down on her reflection in the window She looks like hell. Hollow cheeks and thumbprints beneath her eyes dark enough to see even like this. Even in the rippling black of the tiny pane.

She looks like hell, but it drives her. Flips some switch inside that curls her fingers under the sill. She tugs once— _hard_ _—_ and it almost takes her down. She swears against the glass, sure she's bleeding. Sure that something inside is bleeding, though she's scars from head to toe.

She breathes through it. The pain is there. The stretch and pull and the burn that licks under her ribs. It's always there, and this is bad. Stupid, and it hurts. But it's . . . confined. Action and reaction connected by threads so obvious she knows they've been there all along.

She shakes her head at herself. That hurts, too. Everything hurts, but _that_ she deserves.

She goes for the sill again. She's smarter this time. She grounds herself by the heels of her hands and leans hard into them. Works her knuckles under the stubborn metal of the window's handles and rocks, pressure slow and steady until the wood gives with a groan. The sash glides up. An inch. Two.

The city creeps in on a breeze. The cool late summer air licking over flushed skin. Sound. Voices from the street. Close. It's music. She turns her palm up like she can hold the evening on it.

She waits for the fear. Terror. She waits for her mind to go dark and her muscles to jerk in on themselves. She waits for the floor to rise up to meet her and scalding tears.

A horn sounds in the distance. A shout nearer than that and her fist closes. Her fingers find the sill and curl hard around it. Her heart beats fast and the buzz fills her ears. Her head, but she fights it down. She stands and breathes and it passes. Leaves her gulping and weak-kneed, but it passes. Fills her with fierce, flinty pride.

Her eyes open and she turns. She's moving before she knows where, her fingers trailing. Finding purchase and propping her up when she needs it. She's moving, slow and determined with the city at her back. With the window cracked open. She leaves it. Hovers for a second, uncertain and afraid, but she leaves it be. She lets the city fill the room.

She's at the door now, turning one lock, then the other. The scent of warm summer air is on her skin as she slides back the chain. As she leaves her jacket behind and goes.

She twists through the streets. A superstitious retracing. She takes every needless turn and switchback. Up one side of this street and down the other side, trailing her knuckles on brick. She turns the last corner and stops.

He's there. Anchored and adrift between plate glass and a bus stop bench. He's there.

Her mouth drops open and her hand rises up. It's nothing like before. It's nothing like that moment of joy.

It's awful. The look on his face. It's awful.

She turns to go. She means to, but it's like a light going out inside her.

He's moving toward her, fast now. Angry. He's shouting. Hissing words she can't hear for the rushing in her ears.

"Don't. _Don_ _'_ _t!_ "

She makes that out. Sees it more than hears it, because he's close enough to touch.

"Don't fall. Don't fall. God, Beckett, please don't _fall._ "

"I'm not," she says, but he's catching her.

Hands at her elbows and hips before she can worry about her scars. His body crowding hers to the bench. Settling her down and drawing back. Drawing back like her skin is alive with sparks. With fire or something dangerous.

She makes her fingers work. They close, weak and desperate, around one of his. An absurd, child's gesture, but it stills him. Those brittle, pale fingers, frail and skeletal against his.

"You're here." The words are all but lost. The only two she has and the city wants to swallow them.

"I'm not." It's not his voice. Not any version she's every heard. It's a lifeless, awful thing and he shakes his head in sorrow. Anger and absolute desolation. "I'm not here any more than you are."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all I'd written. Again, I'm sorry it doesn't have an ending.


End file.
